Snippet: Inside the Copilot+ Recall Disaster ☇

Kevin Beaumont:

A lot of Windows users just want their PCs so they can play games, watch porn, and live their lives as human beings who make mistakes.. that they don’t always want to remember, and the idea other people with access to the device could see a photographic memory is.. very scary to a great many people on a deeply personal level. Windows is a personal experience. This shatters that belief.

I think they are probably going to set fire to the entire Copilot brand due to how poorly this has been implemented and rolled out. It’s an act of self harm at Microsoft in the name of AI, and by proxy real customer harm.

This fact that this feature is basically on by default and requires numerous steps to disable is going to create a lot of problems for people, especially those who click through every privacy/permission screen and fundamentally don’t know how their computer actually operates—I’ve counted way too many instances where I’ve had to help people find something and they have no idea where anything lives in their file system (mostly work off the Desktop or Downloads folders). How are they going to even grapple with this?

Microsoft should make this feature opt-in or even make it a separate product that you can install.